I added real-time chat to my blog, and trolls used it to attack me
I added a real-time chat to my blog, people used it to attack me
A developer added a simple, ephemeral chat widget to his blog, expecting nothing from it. But after sharing a controversial article on Hacker News, the chat became a weapon: trolls flooded it with insults, hate speech, spam, and even impersonated him. He describes the attacks, the countermeasures he took, and the lessons learned about real-time moderation and the hostile nature of user input.
Every input is hostile until proven otherwise.
- zetanor
Talking about this like there's an "attack" feels very melodramatic. It seems to me like the non-constructive messages are either shitposts or just curious probes (testing whether certain codepoints make it through, testing whether bad no-no words make it through, testing how various things will render, testing whether the input is sanitized...). There's links to God knows what and some walls of inflammatory language, but I'm not noticing anything that could even remotely cause any harm.
- egypturnash
The chat is still there in the corner of this post, with people typing nasty shit into it.
Well have fun delving into programmatic censorship I guess. Or just take it out. If you take the former path and post about trying to fix it here then I'm sure you'll get a lot more free testing of your attempts to enforce civility through regex or whatever. Enjoy learning about the Scunthorpe problem.
- dylan604
From the earliest days of websites allowing text input from users, this has been a thing. The same with any website that allows you to draw things, it will quickly show people drawing crude (in content not skill) objects. This is just human nature. Once people realized you could use these forms as attack vectors, we were off to the races. Now that bots can do it for you, I'd only imagine the time before first bot using the form is in minutes. I have seen all sorts of things suggested as workarounds to mitigate bot form submissions, but eventually, you will be spammed at the least with the feature. Adding something like a bot chat, of course people are going to be abusive to it much more than a simple form field.
For someone to be surprised by this today suggests to me that the person is really really new to managing a website.
- alnwlsn
I've done this to myself too. I once had a thermal receipt printer I wasn't using, so I decided to point a webcam at it and put it on a webpage so anyone could print random crap to it (it's actually still up - alnwlsn.com/printer). Of course I went in knowing full well what I was getting into, and the types of messages posted to it are about what you expect and get here. Some highlights:
- It was once found by one of those worse-than-4chan places, who spent about 4 hours spamming the worst things you could imagine until it ran out of paper. I added some filtering after that to stop tons of duplicate messages from wasting so much paper and some regex, which reduced the volume of some particularly vile things. Some people do post nice messages too.
- The setup breaks often. Eventually, I'll notice and fix it, but it might have been broken for months. Inevitibly, there will be people using it again within days, with no announcement made. How enough people find it on this tiny corner of the internet is a mystery to me, but they do. I am convinced most of them are real people, because why even bother to point a bot at it?
The whole point was that I thought it would be more interesting than letting the thing sit around on a shelf, and to use up the box of rolls that came with it instead of throwing the whole thing in the trash. Intersting it is; I don't think I would describe it as plesant, but it is interesting.
- JSR_FDED
I’d suggest one additional heuristic: once your bad word detector has triggered, shut down the chat for 10 minutes. That way waves of assholes don’t monopolize the chat, and when they move on to the next target the functionality returns to your site automatically.